Tuesday, November 22, 2005

SBL Final Report

The last SBL session on NT TC was on Monday 21 November. It featured Holger Strutwolf, who has replaced Barbara Aland as director of the INTF in Münster. His paper 'The Transmission of the New Testament between Christian Philosophical School and Scriptoria: Some Observations concerning the "Sitz im Leben" of Christian Textual Traditions' argued that in the second century there were two styles of copying the text, a looser and a tighter style, and that the looser style was to be connected with Christian philosophical schools, which were prepared to emend the text, because these schools were modelled on pagan philosophical schools which did such things to secular texts. During the question time he also expressed support for Trobisch's theory that there was a single canonical edition of the NT made during the second century.

The next paper was by William L. Petersen (Penn State - world expert on the Diatessaron) arguing that Second Clement shows that the text of parts of the NT that it cites were not verbally fixed during the second century.

The third paper, by Thomas J. Kraus, treated 'manuscripts' of the Lord's prayer. Apparently there are a number of texts of this that are not usually listed in manuscript lists: early versions of the Lord's prayer on amulets, pieces of wood, pottery, papyrus, parchment, and even inscribed on stone. These show considerable variety amongst themselves (and are not strict textual witnesses). A number of the texts show some of the Lord's prayer alongside parts of Psalm 90.

I had to leave before Juan Hernández, Jr, spoke on 'Scribal Tendencies in the Apocalypse: Starting the Conversation'.

I found one of Hernandez's conclusions interesting, that the 2 mss he collated had a greater tendency toward omission in their singular readings than addition, and thus, they produced a shorter reading. Apparently, the shorter reading canon fails in this case.